Medical Futures Lab

I recently had a conversation with my friend who is a first year medical student and I made a comment about his new iPad. He began to tell me that his medical school requires that every new student purchase an iPad, a policy that is becoming a norm at medical schools around the nation. While most hospitals don’t allow electronic medical records to be viewed on an iPad, there are many useful mobile applications for medical students or doctors to use when they are making rounds or studying. Here are three that are especially popular or newly created:

source: techvibes.com

• Epocrates- Probably the most popular and well-known app used by medical professionals. It allows medical professionals to look up most drugs, and view the correct dosage amounts for children and adults. It also allows shows side effects and harmful interactions with other drugs. It has been used to replace the physician’s desk reference book.
• Touch Surgery- This is a relatively new app designed to help surgeons in training to learn the steps of an operation. It was created to help make up for the hours of surgical residents being cut, which means less time in the operating room practicing needed skills. The app is also designed to improve patient safety and to give medical students and surgical residents a boost of confidence before trying the procedure on a patient. 
• Up To Date- This app has an abundance of reference information that physicians can look up when trying to make a treatment decision. It is often used to look up innovative treatment approaches that physicians report have been successful in the past, when normal treatment options aren’t working.

These new apps, especially Epocrates and Up To Date, have the potential to make medical training less about memorizing thousands of pieces information and instead place a larger emphasis on understanding. Instead of essentially having medical training turn physician’s into walking computers, physicians now have the ability to carry around unlimited information with them on a tablet.

The increasing use of mobile apps is inevitable in the future of medical care, so the question becomes to what extent should physicians rely on these applications. A trusting patient-physician relationship often stems from the belief that our doctor has much more knowledge about our condition then us, but perhaps this view is becoming outdated. As information is readily available online, it is reasonable to assume that a patient could be more informed about their condition then their doctor. Medical training needs to change to accommodate this shifting relationship, with a greater emphasis on understanding a patient’s needs and trying to incorporate them into a treatment plan. It needs to not only teach physicians information, but also how to find needed information. However, we must stay wary of becoming too dependent on these applications, and not focus our time looking at a screen instead of the patient.